Abdul R. JanMohamed - The Death-Bound-Subject (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

Richard Wrights first published short story, Big Boy Leaves Home, consists of a rite of initiation in which the protagonist, generically named Big Boy, reaches his manhood by being forced to witness the shooting of two of his friends and the slow, gruesome lynching of another. In Wrights last published novel, The Long Dream, which revisits the same scene (the parallelism of which will be explored in detail in ), a similar initiation requires Fishbelly, the young protagonist of this bildungsroman, to reach his manhood also by watching a lynching, less gruesome, but no doubt more traumatic: not only is he forced by the white chief of police to watch his father, who has been shot by the police, bleed to death slowly, but he is also prevented from summoning medical help, thereby being compelled to share the guilt of his fathers death. In between these two fictional events, Wright complainsat about the age of eleven, when, after a very traumatic childhood, he is caught up in the frenzied white riots and numerous lynchings in the South that followed the First World Warthat, though I had never in my life been abused by whites,I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings (Black Boy, 72). Though all the evidence available to us strongly suggests that Wright was a gentle, loving man, the evidence is equally clear that his fiction is replete with gruesome, deathly violence: lynching, murder, and violent struggles to the death are the leitmotifs that tie his novels and short stories together into a coherent body of work. Wright was clearly obsessed with death and lynching. For instance, his first three fictional works, a collection of five short stories and two novels, contain a total of twenty violent, gruesome deaths, including those of all but two of the protagonists. Though critics have commented on the ubiquitousness of violence in Wrights work, it is curious that no one has yet fully articulated the fundamental ideological and political functions of death in his work and life.

This is understandable to some extent: death is an eventuality that none of us want to examine too closely; it immediately, universally, and perhaps automatically provokes disavowal of one sort or another. But, if we are willing and able to bracket our fears and anxieties about death and look closely at its political valences and functions in Wrights fiction, something remarkable is revealed. I hope to demonstrate by the end of this study that Wright conducted, partly through a series of conscious and deliberate decisions, but partly through extremely sharp intuitive, often unconscious choices, a systematic and thorough archaeology of what I will call the death-bound-subject, that is, of the subject who is formed, from infancy on, by the imminent and ubiquitous threat of death. The death-bound-subject is a deeply aporetic structure to the extent that he is bound, and hence produced as a subject, by the process of unbinding. The processes through which that aporetic subject is produced by the threat of death constitute the fundamental object of this study. Put in their simplest forms, the cardinal questions posed in the rest of this book are the following: What happens to the life of a subject who grows up under the threat of death, a threat that is constant yet unpredictable? How does that threat permeate the subjects life? How far and how finely does death penetrate into the capillary structures of subjectivity (considered here as a psychopolitical construct)? And, finally, once death has percolated into the innermost reaches of subjectivity, what kinds of effects does it have, and how does it manifest it self eventually in the comportment, attitudes, and actions of the death-bound-subject? Though Wright never fully articulated the questions in this manner, I hope to demonstrate that they furnish the underlying teleological structure of his work.

I will be arguing that Wrights pursuit of these questions was unconsciously tenacious to the point of obsession and that each of his fictional works excavates progressively deeper layers of the same site, that on which the formation of the death-bound-subject took place. And what Wrights archaeology of death unearths is neither idiosyncratic nor, ultimately, eccentric; it is, indeed, extreme, but not eccentric. Because it throws everything into stark relief, it is the kind of extremity that better allows us to comprehend the normal effects of the threat of death on the formation of subjectivity. And, because it can do this, it opens up a door to the critical understanding of a much larger formation and tradition. My work on Wright has convinced me that there exists a powerful, if somewhat submerged, tradition within African American literature and culture that continually and systematically meditates on the effectivity of the threat of death as a mode of coercion. I say somewhat submerged because the traditions existencefrom the earliest slave narratives (Equianos reporting of slaves being buried alive, Douglasss classic battle with Covey, and Jacobss equally classic form of resisting slavery by a prolonged sequestering of herself in her grandmothers garret, a space roughly twice the size of a coffin, where she almost dies several times), to the powerful contemporary re-evaluations and renewed articulations (a remarkable cluster of feminist novels such as